When driving into Vienna from the airport, the countryside quickly gives way to an oil refinery and then to a power plant.

The triumph of industry over the splendors of the Hapsburgs? Not quite. These are gleaming Austrian examples of industry that seem to produce no more than a little benign steam. And Vienna is just around the corner, sedate and bourgeois, living its unhurried life as capital of a small and prosperous country that only gets talked about when the odd trace of its Nazi past – or right-wing extremism of today – seeps into the steam rising skywards.

The Austrians say there's more to them than controversial politicians like Kurt Waldheim or Jorg Haider. Indeed, and there's more to Vienna than its imperial past or the fact that figures both famous and infamous stirred their hopes, fears and visions into the coffee of its innumerable cafes.

But that's not what the tourist wants to know. The tourist wants to guzzle down the richness of history and sip Viennese coffee in the imaginary company of the likes of Franz Kafka and Sigmund Freud.

Vienna tries hard to cater to its many tourists, and the result is a strangely packaged city. A Mozart look-alike in 18th-century garb sits on a bench eating a slice of pizza; a crowd of Japanese tourists in kimonos draws the avid attention of other Japanese tourists; delegates to a conference on obesity file out of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's headquarters in the Hoffburg, the former palace of the Hapsburgs, and sit down on the grass to eat packed lunches. Across the road, more people clad in 18th-century attire, coachmen this time, wait beside their shining carriages for video-camera-toting tourists.

Vienna is no Moscow. It is a compact city, easy to walk around, with the central areas abounding in pedestrian streets. The most famous of them – Kaerntnerstrasse – is full of shops selling Mozartkugeln chocolates and other Mozart-inspired artifacts.

The Viennese didn't adopt the Soviet practice of putting prominent plaques in the "Lenin spent the night here" style on all the places where Mozart stayed, although one of his many dwellings has become a museum. I only realized Mozart and I had chosen to abide in the same building when I glimpsed a small plaque in the corridor, discreetly surrounded by others advertising the services of his various present-day compatriots.

Plenty more Mozarts wander round outside the Stefansdom, Vienna's landmark cathedral and symbol. The soaring gothic building was severely damaged at the end of World War II, but was painstakingly rebuilt by the Viennese. As for the Mozarts, they're there to entice music lovers to concerts, although they have to compete for tourists' attention with the usual international gaggle of street performers and frighteningly unfidgety gold and silver people earning a living as human statues. A more local touch came from an elderly down-and-out fellow with medals clinking on his chest, who looked like he'd been kept in a time capsule since the days the Austro-Hungarian troops first marched into battle to avenge Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

It's never easy to lose grand status. Vienna must be one of the only European capitals that has seen its population shrink noticeably over the last century, as it lost its place as seat of a cosmopolitan empire. An antique shop specializing in imperial era bric-a-brac sold cards saying, "God Bless the Kaiser" in many languages, including Russian. The German version of the card directed the blessing specifically at Emperor Franz Josef, the longest-reigning of the Hapsburgs.

That Vienna once felt itself a grand imperial power is visible above all on the Ringstrasse, the boulevard commissioned by Franz Josef to replace the old city walls. It circles the old town center with a string of imposing buildings that swell with stern pride and monumental ambition. Austria's most infamous son, Adolf Hitler, who spent some time in Vienna, compared the Ringstrasse to the Arabian Nights in the way it could enthrall and enchant for hours on end. Indeed, the future Nazi dictator eked out a living by painting and selling pictures of his beloved buildings.

Oskar Kokoschka, a Viennese artist who got into the art school the same year that Hitler's application was rejected said he wished it had been the other way round so as to have spared Europe the horrors of Hitler's frustrations. Kokoschka emigrated, but some of his paintings hang in the Austrian Gallery in the Upper Belvedere palace, along with works by his much-loved fellow artist Gustav Klimt. The Klimt market in Vienna is almost as big as the Mozart market, with the artist's gold-streaked paintings reproduced on every object imaginable.

One sumptuous room in the Upper Belvedere with a sweeping view of the city commemorates a different kind of event – the signing of the treaty in 1955 that saw Soviet forces withdraw from Austria after a decade during which the country had been occupied and Vienna divided up along similar lines to Berlin. Back toward the center of town, a war memorial commemorates the Red Army and nearby, a building occupied by LUKoil attests to a more modern-day Russian presence.

For architecture of the type Hitler probably wouldn't have liked, there's always the Hundertwasser house, a municipal housing block turned into a curving, crooked fantasy by an architect who abhorred straight lines. My Russian guidebook said that American women are particularly enamored of this building. Not being an American woman, it's hard for me to judge. All I can say is that tourists from many countries crowd around the building, which is certainly curious in a kitschy sort of way. But it seemed to me better in the photos than in real life, or, perhaps it's just that the photos come without throngs of tourists.

Admittedly, I didn't see any Russians at the Hundertwasser house, but they were elsewhere, stocking up on Mozart chocolates with the best and broadest of the Americans. Getting away from the tourists can be hard and some people don't even want to, anyway.

Guidebooks are always proposing options "off the beaten track," but then everyone buys the guidebook and the vicious circle takes another spiral. In Vienna, virtually all the tracks are beaten to a pulp and there's nothing for it but to accept the fact.

That's why it's worth forgetting maps and guidebooks and simply walking the twists and turns of the streets. If you want them and look for them, you can still find corners of the city where people are just getting on with their sedate Viennese lives and there's not a camera in sight. And there, where there are no dressed-up Mozarts and none of his bewigged portraits adorning chocolate boxes, you can take in the spirit of the city and get a sense of where the great composer perhaps drew his inspiration all those years ago.